Present and past participles at the same time

Question

As part of my efforts to improve my English, I'm trying to paraphrase the following statement by the founder of Wikitribune and it turns out to be such a challenging job for a non-native English speaker because it complicatedly has "present and past" participle phrases in the same sentence:

This will be the first time that professional journalists and citizen journalists will work side by side as equals writing stories as they happen, editing them as they develop and at all times backed by a community checking and rechecking all facts.

Would you find these two paraphrases I came up with grammatically correct? Could there be any better or more versions?:

(A)  "This will be the first time that professional journalists and citizen journalists will write stories as they happen, edit them as they develop and at all times be backed by a community checking and rechecking all facts as they work side by side as equals."
(B) "This will be the first time that professional journalists and citizen journalists will work side by side as equals as they write stories as they happen, edit them as they develop and ARE at all times backed by a community checking and rechecking all facts."

I would really appreciate any advice, desperately seeking answers.

Peter Shor · Answer

All three sentences, including the original, are lacking in parallelism.

For example, in (B), the verbs (they) write and (they) edit are  in the active voice, but (they) are backed is in the passive voice.

This isn't a fatal flaw, and I believe your sentences are grammatically correct, but it makes them sound awkward, especially (B). There are several ways you can get around it. For example, you could rewrite (B) as:

This will be the first time that professional journalists and citizen journalists will work side by side as equals as they write stories as they happen and edit them as they develop, while at all times being backed by a community checking and rechecking all facts.

Why does (A) sound better than (B)? I think it's because in (A), (they) will write, (they will) edit), and (they will) be backed all have the auxiliary verb will in them.

Present and past participles at the same time

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